Electronic Book Review - elisabeth joycehttp://www.electronicbookreview.com/tags/elisabeth-joyce
enI'll be a postfeminist in a postpatriarchy, or, Can We Really Imagine Life after Feminism?http://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/writingpostfeminism/%28fem%29sci-fi
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<div class="field-item even">Lisa Yaszek</div>
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<div class="field field-name-field-publication-date field-type-datetime field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single">2005-01-29</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>When Elisabeth Joyce first asked me to write an essay for <span class="journaltitle">ebr</span> ‘s postfeminist thread I jumped at the opportunity. Although I first learned feminist principles from my parents as a child in the 1970s, and I continue to teach those principles to students in my gender studies classes at Georgia Tech today, I admit that my understanding of the term “postfeminism” has been somewhat hazy. As I began researching this issue and discussing it with my colleagues and students, I realized I was not alone. After all, “postfeminism” seems to be used in even more complex and contradictory ways than “feminism” itself: to herald a new era of (at least theoretical) equality between men and women, to explain the rise of a New Traditionalism that looks much like the old traditionalism of the antifeminist 1950s, to champion the possibility of unfettered individual choice for women outside conventional political categories, to make sense of the diverse needs of women in the integrated circuit of global capitalism, and, finally, to mark theoretical and epistemological shifts in feminism itself. As such, postfeminism seems to be simultaneously elegiac and celebratory, descriptive and proscriptive, a <span class="lightEmphasis">fait accompli</span> and an impossible dream.</p>
<p>My goal here is to begin making sense of postfeminism by mapping out its primary meanings for contemporary scholars and artists. Accordingly, in the first part of this essay I consider the multiple origin stories associated with postfeminism and how they inform the use of this term in three types of critical theory and aesthetic practice: feminist media studies, feminist literary and cultural theory, and contemporary women’s literature. In the second part of this essay I examine a fourth kind of critical and aesthetic practice that has long embraced the tenets of progressive postfeminism: feminist science fiction (SF).</p>
<p>The challenges inherent in pinning down any single meaning - or even several meanings - for postfeminism are perhaps best illustrated by the diversity of origin stories attached to the word itself. My own research uncovered at least seven such stories. The most common origin story posits that postfeminism first appeared in the <span class="journaltitle">New York Times Sunday Magazine</span> during the mid-1970s, where it was (rather prematurely) used to celebrate women’s newfound equality in the public sphere and thus the completion of all feminist reform (Robinson 273). <cite id="note_1" class="note">Elaine Tuttle Hansen more specifically claims that <span class="journaltitle">The New York Times</span> first used the term “postfeminism” in October 1982 rather than in the mid-1970s (5). Either way, it is interesting to note that <span class="journaltitle">Times</span> staff writers seem to be some of the most enthusiastic promoters of conservative postfeminism. For example, Tania Modleski begins her book <span class="booktitle">Feminism without Women: Culture and Criticism in a “Postfeminist” Age</span> with another example from the <span class="journaltitle">Times</span> in 1987, and I myself have counted at least half a dozen similar uses of the term in the <span class="journaltitle">Times</span> over the past two years.</cite> Other sources also date the emergence of this term to the 1970s and 1980s, but attribute its creation to either continental philosophers Maria-Antoinetta Macciocchi and Julia Kristeva or to British theorist Toril Moi (Russo 28; Kavka 29). In both cases, postfeminism is used to “advocate a feminism that would deconstruct the binary between equality-based or ‘liberal’ feminism and difference-based or “radical’ feminism” (Kavka 29). Still other accounts suggest that postfeminism “is foremost - historically speaking - a product of the interventions of women of color into the feminist debate” during the 1980s (Koenen 132). And perhaps the most surprising origin story attributes the term to a mid-1970s New Zealand bumper sticker that proclaimed “I’LL BE A POSTFEMINIST IN A POSTPATRIARCHY” (Kavka 29).</p>
<p>Although most postfeminism origin stories seem to have emerged in response to the revival of feminism in the 1960s and 1970s - making them, in essence, “post-second-wave-feminism” origin stories - at least two other accounts indicate that the term first appeared more than half a century previously in response to first-wave feminism. Following Susan Faludi, Amanda D. Lotz dates the first use of the term to the 1920s popular press, who used it to celebrate the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment and thus the “natural” conclusion of feminism itself. Elsewhere, Lillian S. Robinson argues that postfeminism emerged in 1919 when the editors of the American feminist journal <span class="journaltitle">Judy</span> rededicated the magazine to “human liberation beyond the now-resolved male-female dialectic” (276). Like many feminists today, then, the editors of <span class="journaltitle">Judy</span> saw feminism as a kind of analytic tool that could be applied to a range of social and political injustices beyond those faced specifically by women.</p>
<p>These diverse accounts may not provide us with a single, stable understanding of postfeminism, but they do suggest certain provocative trends in the concept’s history. As both the first- and second-wave stories clearly indicate, members of the mass media tend to use the term in a markedly different manner than feminists themselves. When journalists for <span class="journaltitle">The New York Times</span> or <span class="journaltitle">People</span> magazine write about postfeminism, they typically use the term in a very literal way: to describe the contemporary moment as one in which the goals of feminism have been achieved. In such accounts, this paves the way for a new era where women can follow in the footsteps of their feminist mothers and tough it out in the public sphere with their male counterparts - or, these same accounts suggest, contemporary women can be “truly” cutting edge and re-embrace older, seemingly simpler and more natural roles as homemakers (Probyn 152). Although this kind of new traditionalist rhetoric emerged in the 1980s in tandem with a more general backlash against feminism, feminist scholars such as Tania Modleski have been quick to point out that the two are not equivalent. If anything, New Traditionalist postfeminism is far more insidious than the backlash against feminism precisely because it “has been carried out not against feminism, but in its very name” (x).</p>
<p>Of course, feminist discussions of postfeminism also tend to cluster around historical periods marked by intense feminist activity. However, rather than using the term to celebrate the <span class="lightEmphasis">completion</span> of such activity, feminists typically use it to assess the current state of progressive women’s politics and to explore how these politics might be modified, elaborated upon, and even expanded in relation to other significant cultural theories and historical events. As such, these discussions mark the beginning of a new cycle of feminist activity. Such activity tends to fall into one of three broad categories: scholarly examinations of gender politics as they are represented in the mass media (what we might call empirical studies of postfeminism); critical elaborations of feminism in relation to other prominent literary and cultural theories (what we might call theoretical postfeminism); and finally, the search on the part of women creative writers for new narratives that make sense of women’s lives beyond those already identified by feminist scholars (what I will call literary postfeminism).</p>
<p>Feminist media studies scholars have long been interested in depictions of women in television, film, and, more recently, on the Internet. Over the past decade and a half, scholars working in this discipline have turned their attention to the explosion of female-centered shows and films that implicitly - and sometimes even explicitly - engage the history of feminism itself. A great deal of this new scholarship is cautionary, exploring how conservative notions of postfeminism and new traditionalism, as they are espoused by journalists working for <span class="journaltitle">The New York Times</span> and <span class="journaltitle">People</span> magazine, are reiterated in television shows such as L.A. Law and the Star Trek franchise and films, including <span class="booktitle">Thelma and Louise</span> and <span class="booktitle">Sense and Sensibility</span>. As Elspeth Probyn argues, these TV programs and films appropriate the feminist language of choice, shear it of its sociopolitical charge and then “hawk the home as “the natural choice’ - which means, of course, no choice” (152). Thus conservative, media-generated visions of postfeminism are guided by the implicit (and sometimes explicit) assumption that women <span class="lightEmphasis">can’t</span> have it all, that they must choose between: feminism and femininity (Moseley and Read 231); workplace and family (Probyn 147); protest against patriarchy and participation in romance and marriage (Samuelian 46); “crazy” collective political action and “more balanced” individual solutions (Press 11). In essence, then, conservative media postfeminism offers its viewers a depoliticized notion of choice that ultimately reinforces a patriarchal and capitalist status quo.</p>
<p>In the late 1990s feminist media scholars began to explore a somewhat more progressive trend in popular representations of postfeminism, noting that new shows offered viewers more thoughtful assessments of feminism’s legacy. As Rachel Moseley and Jacinda Read argue, such shows “[do] not centre on a conflict between career and personal life, but instead on the struggle to hold them together” (232). Additionally, Amanda D. Lotz suggests, progressive postfeminist shows “explore the diverse relations to power women inhabit” by investigating the impact of race and class on gender and through sympathetic treatments of the search for a suitable sexual partner and the challenges of single motherhood (115). Of course, as even the most ardent advocate of these newer postfeminist shows acknowledges, they are certainly not in the majority, nor are their political allegiances always consistent or clear. Nonetheless, they provide important insight into the diverse ways that feminist ideas are represented in the mass media.</p>
<p>As Lotz suggests in her review of recent media scholarship, critical insights into the progressive possibilities of postfeminist television and film are themselves direct results of new developments in literary and cultural theories of postfeminism. Much like other theoretical “posts,” theoretical postfeminism is not just about what historically comes after feminism. Rather, it encompasses a variety of attempts to identify and critique certain problematic assumptions in feminism, just as postmodernism critiques modernism and postcolonialism critiques colonialism. For example, Bette Mandl identifies two problems that have become central to postfeminist mediations on second-wave feminism: the discursive conflation of women’s community with family (which sometimes created unbearable tensions between self-development and altruistic sisterhood) and an emphasis on the biological homogeneity of all women which failed to acknowledge the specificities of race and class or the possibility of fruitful alliances between women and gays in any sustained way (124, 126). Not surprisingly then, theoretical postfeminists including Judith Butler, Anne Fausto-Sterling, and Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari ask us to think about sex and gender as “political rather than biological categories” that exist “as a multiplicity of spaces along a line of continuum rather than as a simple opposition” and thus to imagine a new kind of progressive politics “that is pulsional, equivocal, [and] flirtational” rather than unified and universal (Davis 132, 133). <cite id="note_2" class="note">For similar descriptions of theoretical postfeminism, see also Misha Kavka’s “Feminism, Ethics, and History, or What Is the “Post’ in Postfeminism?” and Lisa Joyce’s <a href="/writingpostfeminism/postfeminism" class="internal">Writing Postfeminism</a>. While Kavka focuses primarily on the impact of continental philosophy on postfeminism, Joyce provides readers with a succinct discussion of postfeminism that seems more indebted to the North American tradition of pragmatic feminist criticism.</cite></p>
<p>Given this emphasis on multiple, denaturalized subjectivities and fluid, nonlinear political strategies, it is not surprising that theoretical postfeminism is characterized by a sustained interest in reassessing feminism through the critical lens of poststructuralist and postmodern thinking. For example, postfeminists often invoke Derrida and Lacan as well as their female counterparts Hélène Cixous, Julia Kristeva, and Luce Irigaray to demonstrate how earlier modes of feminism posited an inevitable opposition between phallocentrism and gynocentrism without acknowledging how the two are bound together by a shared investment in logocentrism. The task for postfeminists, as Diane Mowery Davis sees it, is to recognize this commonality and then to move beyond it by embracing a “third position that is not really a position at all but a perpetual mobility”; indeed, for Davis this is key to the development of flirtational politics (130). <cite id="note_3" class="note">For further discussion of the relations between feminism, continental theory, and postfeminism, see also Mary Russo’s “Notes on “Post-Feminism.’”</cite> Elsewhere, Anne Koenen argues that some of the most persuasive visions of postfeminism have come from feminists of color such as bell hooks, Barbara Christian, and Gloria Andalzua, who appropriate “male, pale, and Yale” theories about the fragmentation of the subject, the deconstruction of the center, and changing notions of literary canonization, modifying them to “suit the context of the margin and to evade the blind spots of those theories” (131). In the hands of such scholars, postfeminism becomes a crucial means by which to articulate the multiplicity of subject positions that modern women experience - and the multiple ways that they theorize this experience for themselves and others (135).</p>
<p>Finally, theoretical postfeminism provides scholars with an opportunity to rethink feminist praxis in relation to the advanced sciences and technologies that increasingly shape life in a postindustrial era. In 1985 Donna Haraway’s groundbreaking “Cyborg Manifesto” urged feminists to begin seriously considering the promises and perils of a technoscientific culture that reorganizes women’s relations to themselves, their families, and their communities in the name of global capitalism. Haraway’s arguments have inspired an explosion of feminist “cyborg studies” in the past two decades, especially as they pertain to what are sometimes called postfeminist appropriations of electronic writing technologies. Indeed, one of the primary goals of the original <span class="journaltitle">ebr</span> postfeminist weave was just that: to show how “women are just as involved in the electronic frontier of the Web as men are” (<a href="/writingpostfeminism/postfeminism" class="internal">Joyce</a>, para. 1). Electronic writing technologies have become increasingly central to postfeminist thinking about contemporary women’s writing, I believe, because they seem to be ideal mediums through which to explore the multiple subjectivities and histories that postfeminists theorize about elsewhere. <cite id="note_4" class="note">For scholarly discussions of electronic technologies and women’s writing, see Anne Balsamo’s “Feminism for the Incurably Informed” and Janine Marchessault and Kim Sawchuk’s <span class="booktitle">Wild Science: Reading Feminism, Medicine and the Media</span>. For discussions oriented toward a more general audience, see Carla Sinclair’s <span class="booktitle">Netchick: A Smart-Girl Guide to the Wired World</span> and Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards’ <span class="booktitle">Manifesta: Young Women, Feminism, and the Future</span>.</cite></p>
<p>Of course, the hope for new narrative forms that adequately capture the diverse experience of contemporary women is not limited to the realm of electronic writing. Rather, it is central to much of the literary postfeminism characteristic of women’s drama, poetry, and fiction of the past several decades. As theater critic Sue-Ellen Case notes, women artists often resist feminism “as an imposition or confinement of their creative processes” (qt. in Mandl 120). Elsewhere, Canadian poet Anne McLean elaborates on this resistance from the perspective of the artist herself, opposing a rich and diverse Western poetic tradition based on “human and self-knowledge” - including self-knowledge about “the worst aspects of what is said about us” - to what she perceives as the “horrifying puritanism” of feminist writing (95). For McLean, this puritanism derives from the feminist imperative to write about just one female archetype, the New Woman, to the exclusion of all other possibilities (96). Here, then, McLean clearly articulates the writer’s concern that feminism might limit her creative possibilities.</p>
<p>So what, then, might come after feminist (specifically second-wave feminist) writing? What might a postfeminist literature look like? Some of the most provocative answers come from Cris Mazza, editor of the popular postfeminist <span class="booktitle">Chick-Lit</span> anthologies (including 1995’s <span class="booktitle">Chick-Lit: Postfeminist Fiction</span> and 1996’s <span class="booktitle">Chick-Lit2: No Chick-Vics</span>). Indeed, Mazza notes that the <span class="booktitle">Chick-Lit</span> anthologies were specifically designed to introduce readers to new women authors who were using experimental narrative forms to depict their hopes and fears “without having to live up to standards imposed by either a persistent patriarchal world or the old feminist insistence that female characters achieve self-empowerment” (104-5). Much like her counterparts in theater and poetry, then, Mazza’s postfeminism is grounded in a specific critique of second-wave feminism as limiting the narrative options available to women writers.</p>
<p>At the same time, Mazza goes beyond her counterparts by specifically describing not just what postfeminist writing reacts against - too many stories about superwomen and too many stories about women as victims - but what it actually looks like:</p>
<p class="longQuotation">It’s writing that says women are independent and confident but not lacking in their share of human weakness and not necessarily self-empowered; that they are dealing with who they’ve made themselves into rather than blaming the rest of the world; that women can use and abuse another human being as well as anyone; that women can be conflicted about what they want and therefore get nothing; that women can love until they hurt someone, turn their own hurt into love, refuse to love, or even ignore the notion of love completely as they confront the other 90 percent of life. Postfeminist writing says female characters don’t have to be superhuman in order to be interesting. Just human. (105)</p>
<p>For Mazza and her co-editors Jeffrey DeShell and Elisabeth Sheffield, postfeminist literature might well derive from a specific critique of feminism, but it is decidedly not antifeminist; indeed, it has the honorable goal of turning “laughter <span class="lightEmphasis">at</span> a woman’s concerns into laughter <span class="lightEmphasis">with</span> a woman” (104). As such, Mazza ultimately positions postfeminist literature as an enactment of the utopian longings inherent in the liberal humanist feminism that has permeated much of American history, including second-wave feminism itself: the simple but profound desire to see women as fully developed people. <cite id="note_5" class="note">For further discussion of the <span class="booktitle">Chick-Lit</span> anthologies and literary postfeminism see Mazza’s essay for <span class="journaltitle">ebr</span>, <a href="/writingpostfeminism/post-traumatic" class="internal">No Victims: The Anti-Theme</a>, as well as Diane Goodman’s <a href="/writingpostfeminism/gutsy" class="internal">What is Chick-Lit?</a> and Elisabeth Sheffield’s <a href="/writingpostfeminism/denotative" class="internal">Postfeminist Fiction</a> (both of which are also posted on in <span class="journaltitle">ebr</span>). For explorations of postfeminism in other contemporary women’s writing, see Paul Christian Jones’s “A Re-Awakening: Anne Tyler’s Postfeminist Edna Pointellier in <span class="booktitle">Ladder of Years</span> “; Janice Doane’s “Undoing Feminism: From the Preoedipal to Postfeminism in Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles”; and Michelle Comstock’s “Grrrl Zine Networks: Re-Composing Spaces of Authority, Gender, and Culture.”</cite></p>
<p>I am particularly interested in Mazza’s comments about postfeminist literature because she provides one of the most extensive discussions of this subject and because as an established author in her own right, she receives a good deal more publicity than her academic counterparts. As such, I believe it is important for us to carefully consider the promises and perils of postfeminism as she articulates it. My first concern has to do with the term postfeminism itself. Given the trickiness of the word - especially as it is bandied about by the popular press and in the mass media - why not simply call this new cycle of women’s theory and praxis “third-wave feminism”? Of course, many postfeminists - including Mazza herself - are beginning to do just that. So why didn’t this happen sooner? The answer lies in the recent history of feminism itself: Discussions of postfeminism began in the 1980s on the heels of second-wave feminism and reached their pinnacle with the <span class="booktitle">Chick-Lit</span> anthologies in the mid-1990s. This is precisely when the phrase “third-wave feminism” first appeared in Rebecca Walker’s <span class="booktitle">To Be Real: Telling the Truth and Changing the Face of Feminism</span> (1995). More recently, Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards have popularized the phrase in their treatise <span class="booktitle">Manifesta: Young Women, Feminism, and the Future</span> (2000) and in their online work for feminist.org. For such authors, the phrase third-wave feminism is preferable to postfeminism precisely because it invokes the long history of collective feminist action in America, including its continued importance for women in the present and, presumably, the future as well.</p>
<p>My second concern has to do with the way postfeminism seems to invoke a “blame-the-victim” mentality in even its most thoughtful and articulate champions. As Bette Mandl notes, when postfeminist scholars and artists focus their attention on the disappointments of second-wave feminism, they run the risk of simply repeating the rhetoric of the popular press and suggesting that if women have failed to achieve their political goals, it is due to problems inherent in feminism rather than due to the intransigence of patriarchal society itself (124). I found this to be particularly apparent in Cris Mazza’s writing. For example, while I certainly share Mazza’s desire for a new kind of literature that depicts women as more than one-dimensional victims or superheroes, I am surprised by the extent to which the victim-and-recovery theme informs her discussion of Chick-Lit. In essence, Mazza casts the struggle to create the <span class="booktitle">Chick-Lit</span> anthologies as one in which she and a few other brave souls must struggle out from under the oppressive dictates of an overly-idealistic feminism that has become so narrow and prescriptive in its thinking that it has, ultimately, been co-opted into patriarchy itself. Although Mazza insists that she and her cohorts are not antifeminists, then at best literary postfeminism seems to be apolitical and afeminist. At worst, it places creative writers in an adversarial relation to the entire history of feminism.</p>
<p>Of course, the question remains: if Mazza and other literary postfeminists had called themselves third-wave feminists, would anything have been different? I cannot help but think that the answer to this question is a resounding yes. When we think about the long history of feminism as stretching from Mary Wollstonecraft’s 1792 manifesto “A Vindication of the Rights of Women” to the present, then we are invited to think about our own hopes and fears not just in relation to second-wave feminism but also in relation to the 175 years of feminist activity that precede it. Furthermore, the very notion of feminist waves is fruitful because it encourages us to think about feminist activity as something that changes over time in relation to specific historical and material conditions, rather than as an ahistorical, monolithic movement that is opposed to any kind of innovation or change. I myself would love to know how authors like Mazza see their work in relation to other waves of feminism and feminist narrative practice: how do the Chick-Lit anthologies compare with, say, Virginia Woolf’s <span class="booktitle">Mrs. Dalloway</span>, a feminist classic that quietly celebrates the ordinary life of an urban housewife who is neither a superwoman nor a victim? Mazza herself admits that she has had a difficult time explaining the <span class="journaltitle">Chick-Lit</span> anthologies to her colleagues in English and Women’s Studies at the University of Illinois (108). Perhaps placing them in a larger historical context might have mitigated these difficulties.</p>
<p>Regardless of whether we call it postfeminism or third-wave feminism, the creative writers’ call for new modes of narrative that enable us to see women as fully developed people rather than abstract superheroes or victims is a powerful one. Accordingly, in the final section of this essay I want to consider another area of literary production where authors have been imagining powerful postfeminist futures since the advent of second-wave feminism: in feminist science fiction (SF), especially as it is written by gay and lesbian authors. <cite id="note_6" class="note">There are, of course, a number of straight feminist SF authors who also explore the possibility of postpatriarchal worlds, including Octavia Butler (whose Xenogenesis trilogy explores human-alien hybrid families comprised of five parents with three distinct genders), Pat Cadigan (who speculates about the impact of virtual reality on conventional notions of sex and gender in her cyberpunk detective novels), and John Varley (who imagines far futures where men and women use advanced technologies to change their sex and invent new gendered identities on a regular basis). Here, however, I have chosen to focus on gay and lesbian authors because they have used SF to imagine postpatriarchy in some of the most groundbreaking and consistently challenging ways.</cite> Much like their Chick-Lit counterparts, such authors offer readers visions of worlds peopled by women (and men) who clearly depart from conventional expectations of sex and gender. They do so, however, by approaching postfeminism itself from a radically different perspective. Rather than asking, “what comes after feminism?” SF authors typically pursue the possibilities inherent in the claim that “I’ll be a postfeminist in a postpatriarchy.” As such, they ask us to think not just within the present moment of incomplete feminist gains but more provocatively, about what might come after the completion of feminist projects and the dismantling of patriarchy itself.</p>
<p>SF is particularly well suited to this kind of speculation because, as SF author and critic Pamela Sargent puts it:</p>
<p class="longQuotation">Other literature can show us women imprisoned by attitudes toward them, at odds with what is expected of them, or making the best of their situation in present or past societies…. sf and fantasy literature can show us women in entirely new or strange surroundings. <span class="lightEmphasis">It can explore what we might become if and when the present restrictions on our lives vanish, or show us new problems or restrictions that might arise</span>. (lx)</p>
<p>Sargent’s comments here can help us better understand both mainstream authors’ reluctance to ally themselves with feminist agendas and feminist authors’ interest in popular or paraliteratures. For the mainstream authors, it might well seem awkward to imagine the completion of the feminist project and the emergence of New Women (and New Men!) when trying to represent a world where neither of these events has yet occurred. Conversely, for feminist authors, SF’s insistence on historical mutability and utopian possibility provides an ideal narrative vehicle through which to posit and explore the always necessary and political question, “what comes after patriarchy?” <cite id="note_7" class="note">In essence, then, SF is a powerful tool that enables authors of all political persuasions to theorize about both science and society in powerful ways. For further discussion, see Carl Freedman’s <span class="booktitle">Critical Theory and Science Fiction</span>.</cite></p>
<p>And indeed, feminist SF authors offer a surprising array of answers to this question. One of the first and most powerful glimpses of postpatriarchy comes at the very end of Joanna Russ’ science fiction classic <span class="booktitle">The Female Man</span> (1975). Russ’ novel follows the adventures of four women who are all variants on the same genotype living on parallel Earths as they prepare for a cataclysmic event that threatens them all: a final, literal Battle of the Sexes. Joanna, the character who inhabits an Earth much like our own, decides that she can best contribute to the war effort as an author. In a highly self-reflexive move, she then writes a book about four variants on the same genotype preparing for a multiverse Battle of the Sexes that she calls - of course - <span class="booktitle">The Female Man</span>. As Joanna sends her book into the world, she imagines what its fate might be if women win the forthcoming war:</p>
<p class="longQuotation">Wash your face and take your place without fuss in the Library of Congress, for all books end up there eventually, both little and big…. Do not get glum when you are no longer understood, little book. Do not curse your fate. Do not reach up from readers’ laps and punch the readers’ noses.<br /> Rejoice, little book!<br /> For on that day, we will be free. (<span class="booktitle">Female Man</span> 213-14)</p>
<p>For both Joanna the character and Joanna Russ the author, a truly postfeminist, postpatriarchal world is one where women will no longer be superheroes or victims (as they so often are in <span class="booktitle">The Female Man</span> itself); instead, it is a world where gender inequity - and stories about it - will simply no longer make sense.</p>
<p>This is not to say that SF authors imagine postpatriarchal worlds as sterile, static places stripped of human desire, but as spaces where the relations between sex, gender, and desire are organized along radically different lines. For instance, as one of the narrators in Samul R. Delany’s <span class="booktitle">Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand</span> (1984) explains:</p>
<p class="longQuotation">In Arachnia as it is spoken on Nepiy, “she” is the pronoun for all sentient individuals of whatever species who have achieved the legal status of “woman.” The ancient, dimorphic form “he,” once used exclusively for the genderal indication of males…for more than a hundred-twenty years now, has been reserved for the general sexual object of “she,” during the period of excitation, regardless of the gender of the woman speaking or the gender of the woman referred to. (78)</p>
<p>Here, Delany articulates insights about the multiplicity of sexed and gendered subjectivities and the mobility of sexual desire much like those offered by theoretical and literary postfeminists. In doing so, he vividly demonstrates how gender may be constituted differently across time and space. Additionally, he suggests that even within a given culture gender may be highly flexible, emerging as it does at the interface of social custom and personal desire.</p>
<p>Although the postfeminist, postpatriarchal worlds of SF are almost always characterized by this kind of gender playfulness and sexual exuberance, they are hardly free of strife. Indeed, the notion of difference within a continuum of sex and gender has become even more central to the current generation of SF authors. For example, Nicola Griffith’s <span class="booktitle">Ammonite</span> (1992) invokes the century-long feminist tradition of imagining an alternate world where all the men have been killed by some natural disaster, thus freeing the women to build a harmonious new society. <cite id="note_8" class="note">This tradition is generally thought to begin with Mary E. Bradley Lane’s <span class="booktitle">Mizora: A Prophecy</span> (1881) and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s <span class="booktitle">Herland</span> (1915). More recent examples include Joanna Russ’ “When It Changed” (1972) and <span class="booktitle">The Female Man</span> (1975) and Marge Piercy’s <span class="booktitle">He, She, and It</span> (1991). For further discussion of women’s utopian writing, see especially Carol Farley Kessler’s <span class="booktitle">Daring to Dream: Utopian Fiction by United States Women before 1950</span> and Jane L. Donawerth and Carol Kolmerton’s <span class="booktitle">Utopian and Science Fiction by Women: Worlds of Difference</span>.</cite> Griffith, however, departs from this tradition by depicting the women of her world as deeply enmeshed in complex relations - to themselves and others, to offworld corporations and planet-bound tribes, to families and romantic partners - that continually threaten the survival of all. As one offworlder explains to her corporate peers: “I know these people. Or what they’ve become. They don’t think the way we do - they never did…. Their way of life is dying. They know that. But what they can’t conceive of is that it’s possible to live another way…. It’s almost impossible to understand” (319). And indeed, although some of these women do come to tentative understandings with one another by the end of <span class="booktitle">Ammonite</span>, many others are left out of these new alliances - and the fate of the planet as a whole is still shrouded in mystery. Here, then, Griffith explores both “what we might become” in a postpatriarchal world and, concurrently, the “new problems and restrictions” that might arise when older ones are banished.</p>
<p>In conclusion, postfeminism encompasses a diverse range of attitudes toward the second-wave variants of feminism that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s. For the most part, conservative and progressive writers alike have used it to think about what comes after those feminist practices that secured important rights for women in the past but that no longer seem to address the complexities of women’s lives in a technology-intensive era of global capitalism. Additionally, postfeminism can be used to describe the creative output of feminist SF authors who explore the radical, politically charged question of what might come after patriarchy itself. With the increasing popularity of the phrase “third-wave feminism” as a descriptor for contemporary women’s progressive politics, however, it seems that postfeminism is rapidly becoming a term whose time has past. Thus we might think of it as one type of third-wave feminism or even as a way to describe a certain strain of theoretical and literary writing that emerged during the transition from second- to third-wave feminism.</p>
<p>Personally, I welcome this change in terminology. As even the most cursory Google search indicates, feminism is alive and well, especially amongst the young women (and even amongst some of the young men) who populate our classrooms and read our books. In contrast to many of those artists and scholars who have identified themselves as postfeminists, this new generation of media-savvy women and men were born long after the rise and fall of second-wave feminism. As such, they evince almost no nostalgia for the mythic dream of a lost sisterhood that seems to permeate much postfeminist writing, nor are they duped by conservative claims about the completion of the feminist project and the return to gender relations as usual. They are, however, remarkably curious about the past, present, and future of feminism. And I, for one, look forward to teaching it to them. After all, it’s like the sticker says: there will be plenty of time to be postfeminists once we all live in a postpatriarchy.</p>
<h2>Works Cited</h2>
<p>Balsamo, Anne. “Feminism for the Incurably Informed.” <span class="journaltitle">South Atlantic Quarterly</span> 92.4 (1993): 681-711.</p>
<p>Baumgardner, Jennifer and Amy Richards. <span class="booktitle">Manifesta: Young Women, Feminism, and the Future</span>. New York: Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2002.</p>
<p>Comstock, Michelle. “Grrrl Zine Networks: Re-Composing Spaces of Authority, Gender, and Culture.” <span class="booktitle">Journal of Advanced Composition</span> 21.2 (2001): 383-409.</p>
<p>Davis, Diane Mowery. “”Breaking Up’ (at) Phallocracy: Post-Feminism’s Chortling Hammer.” <span class="journaltitle">Rhetoric Review</span> 14.1 (1995): 126-141.</p>
<p>Delany, Samuel R. <span class="booktitle">Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand</span>. New York: Bantam Books, 1984.</p>
<p>Doane, Janice. “Undoing Feminism: From the Preoedipal to Postfeminism in Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles.” <span class="journaltitle">American Literary History</span> 2.3 (1990): 422-42.</p>
<p>Donawerth, Jane L. and Carol Kolmerton, eds. <span class="booktitle">Utopian and Science Fiction by Women: Worlds of Difference</span>. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1984.</p>
<p>Freedman, Carl. <span class="booktitle">Critical Theory and Science Fiction</span>. Hanover, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2000.</p>
<p>Griffith, Nicola. <span class="booktitle">Ammonite</span>. New York: Del Ray, 1992.</p>
<p>Hansen, Elaine Tuttle. “Fiction and (Post) Feminism in Atwood’s Bodily Harm.” <span class="booktitle">Novel</span> 19.1 (1985): 5-21.</p>
<p>Haraway, Donna. “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century.” <span class="booktitle">Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature</span>. New York: Routledge, 1991. 149-182.</p>
<p>Jones, Paul Christian. “A Re-Awakening: Anne Tyler’s Postfeminist Edna Pointellier in <span class="booktitle">Ladder of Years</span>.” <span class="journaltitle">Critique</span> 44.3 (Spring 2003): 271-83.</p>
<p>Joyce, Lisa. <a href="/writingpostfeminism/postfeminism" class="internal">Writing Postfeminism</a>. 1996. ebr: writing (post) feminism. Ed. Lisa Joyce and Gay Lynn Crossley. <a href="http://www.electronicbookreview.com">www.electronicbookreview.com</a>. Downloaded May 20, 2004.</p>
<p>Kavka, Misha. “Feminism, Ethics, and History, or What Is the “Post” in Postfeminism?” <span class="booktitle">Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature</span> 21.1 (2002): 29-44.</p>
<p>Kessler, Carol Farley, ed. <span class="booktitle">Daring to Dream: Utopian Fiction by United States Women before 1950</span>. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1994.</p>
<p>Koenen, Ann. “The (Black) Lady Vanishes: Postfeminism, Poststructuralism, and Theorizing in Narratives by Black Women.” <span class="booktitle">Explorations on Post-Theory: Toward a Third Space</span>. Ed. Fernando de Toro. Frankfurt am Main: Vervuert Verlag, 1999. 131-43.</p>
<p>Lotz, Amanda D. “Postfeminist Television Criticism: Rehabilitating Critical Terms and Identifying Postfeminist Attributes.” <span class="booktitle">Feminist Media Studies</span> 1.1 (2001): 105-21.</p>
<p>Mandle, Bette. “Feminism, Postfeminism, and <span class="booktitle">The Heidi Chronicles</span>.” <span class="journaltitle">Studies in the Humanities</span> 17.2 (1990): 120-28.</p>
<p>Marchessault, Janine and Kim Sawchuk, eds. <span class="booktitle">Wild Science: Reading Feminism, Medicine and the Media</span>. London and New York: Routledge, 2000.</p>
<p>Mazza, Cris. “Editing Postfeminist Fiction: Finding the Chic in Lit.” <span class="journaltitle">symploke</span> 8.1-2 (2000): 101-112.</p>
<p>McLean, Anne. “Notes for a Post-feminist Poetry.” <span class="booktitle">The Insecurity of Art</span>. Ed. Ken Norris and Peter Van Toorn. Montreal: Vehicule Press, 1982. 94-96.</p>
<p>Modleski, Tania. <span class="booktitle">Feminism without Women: Culture and Criticism in a “Postfeminist” Age</span>. New York: Routledge, 1991.</p>
<p>Moseley, Rachel, and Jacinda Read. “Having it Ally: Popular Television (Post-)Feminism. <span class="journaltitle">Feminist Media Studies</span> 2.2 (2002): 231-49.</p>
<p>Press, Andrea, and Terry Strathman. “Work, Family, and Social Class in Television Images of Women: Prime-Time Television and the Construction of Postfeminism.” <span class="journaltitle">Women and Language</span> 16.2 (1993): 7-15.</p>
<p>Probyn, Elspeth. “New Traditionalism and Post-Feminism: TV Does the Home.” <span class="journaltitle">Screen</span> 31.2 (1990): 147-59.</p>
<p>Robinson, Lillian S. “Killing Patriarchy: Charlotte Perkins Gilman, the Murder Mystery, and Post-Feminist Propaganda.” <span class="journaltitle">Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature</span> 10.2 (1991): 273-85.</p>
<p>Russ, Joanna. <span class="booktitle">The Female Man</span>. (1975) Boston: Beacon, 1986.</p>
<p>Russo, Mary. “Notes on “Post-Feminism.’” <span class="booktitle">The Politics of Theory: Proceedings of the Essex Conference on the Sociology of Literature</span>. Ed. Francis Barker, Peter Hulme, Margaret Iverson, and Diana Loxley. Colchester: University of Essex Press, 1983. 27-37.</p>
<p>Samuelian, Kristin Flieger. “Piracy is Our Only Option: Postfeminist Intervention in <span class="booktitle">Sense and Sensibility</span>.” <span class="journaltitle">Topic</span> 48 (1997): 39-48.</p>
<p>Sargent, Pamela. “Introduction: Women and Science Fiction.” <span class="booktitle">Women of Wonder: Science Fiction Stories by Women about Women</span>. New York: Vintage Books, 1975. viii-lxiv.</p>
<p>Sinclair, Carla. <span class="booktitle">Netchick: A Smart-Girl Guide to the Wired World</span>. New York: Henry Holt, 1996.</p>
<h2>Notes</h2>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/lisa-yaszek">Lisa Yaszek</a>, <a href="/tags/yaszek">yaszek</a>, <a href="/tags/elisabeth-joyce">elisabeth joyce</a>, <a href="/tags/postfemin">postfemin</a>, <a href="/tags/new-traditionalism">New Traditionalism</a>, <a href="/tags/science-fiction">science fiction</a>, <a href="/tags/maria-antoinetta-macciocchi">Maria-Antoinetta Macciocchi</a>, <a href="/tags/julia-kristeva">julia kristeva</a>, <a href="/tags/theory">theory</a>, <a href="/tags/toril-moi">toril moi</a>, <a href="/tags/lillian-robinson">Lillian Robinson</a>, <a href="/tags/susan-faludi">Susan Faludi</a>, <a href="/tags/probyn">Probyn</a>, <a href="/tags/rachel-moseley">Rachel Moseley</a>, <a href="/tags/jacinda-read">Jacinda Read</a>, <a href="/tags/amanda-lotz">Amanda Lotz</a>, <a href="/tags/judith-butler">judith butler</a>, <a href="/tags/anne-fa">Anne Fa</a></div></div></div>Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:25:05 +0000EBR Administrator1072 at http://www.electronicbookreview.comhttp://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/writingpostfeminism/%28fem%29sci-fi#commentsMemory and Oblivion: The Historical Fiction of Rikki Ducornet, Jeanette Winterson, and Susan Daitchhttp://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/writingpostfeminism/historically
<div class="field field-name-field-author field-type-node-reference field-label-hidden clearfix">
<div class="markup">by</div>
<div class="field-items">
<div class="field-item even">Lisa Joyce</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="field field-name-field-publication-date field-type-datetime field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single">1996-09-01</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p class="epigraph">It is impossible to recover our own past. It is a labour in vain to attempt to recapture it: all the efforts of our intellect must prove futile. The past is hidden somewhere outside the realm, beyond the reach of intellect, in some material object (in the sensation which that material object will give us) which we do not suspect. (Proust 34)</p>
<p>Marcel Proust’s intense focus on the vagaries of memory has surfaced again in a number of contemporary novels as a way to reshape traditional forms of history which had become increasingly inadequate to explain the past. Recent historical fiction includes Madison Smartt Bell’s <span class="booktitle">All Souls’ Rising</span>, a retelling of the 18th century slave rebellion in Haiti; Julia Blackburn’s <span class="booktitle">Daisy Bates in the Desert</span>, a description of a middle-aged Irish matron who spent thirty years in the Australian outback; Blackburn’s <span class="booktitle">The Emperor’s Last Island</span>, a chronicle of Napoleon’s years of exile on St. Helena; Pat Barker’s trilogy on World War I, of which <span class="booktitle">The Ghost Road</span> just won the Booker fiction prize; Elizabeth Arthur’s <span class="booktitle">Antarctic Navigation</span>, a reenactment of Robert Falcon Scott’s Antarctic exploration; and Peter Carey’s <span class="booktitle">Oscar and Lucinda</span>, a rewrite of Edmund Gosse’s <span class="booktitle">Father and Son</span>. As positively as I regard this historical revision, because for female novelists in particular, it allows them to recast history in terms of the social repression of women and to reject the rational methods of traditional historical narrative in favor of the supernatural, I am yet hesitant to endorse it fully, for it is yet an act of appropriation which bears the taint of too much compliance - with the oppressions intact in contemporary culture and with how historical events have brought them into existence.</p>
<p>Contemporary novelists rely increasingly on history for the infrastructure of their work, with the intention to rely no longer on the traditional historical form of linear, sequential lists of events and facts, but instead to recuperate those aspects of history which have been neglected by this approach. Just as Proust weaves through the tangle of his memory to reconstitute the past, Rikki Ducornet, Jeanette Winterson, and Susan Daitch, among others, use the memories of their characters to bring the historical past to life. These novelists emphasize, therefore, the inconsistencies of the memory to show that rational, sequential, event-driven history is at root just as illogical in its granting primacy to certain features of the past as are these contemporary rereadings of history. Ducornet’s narrator, Memory, explains the uncontrollable nature of the memory and its refusal to conform to logical sequence by saying, “I beg my reader’s indulgence. I am no writer, yet intend to tell my story as best I can, to be as ‘linear’ as possible… Yet this morning it seems to me that the story webs and nets about. It is a fabric, not a simple thread. My father used to say: ‘The memory is an anthill. How it swarms!’” (63). The narrator, Memory, denies here the possibility of forcing true and complete history into a timeline; it is a complex of interwoven events, times, places, and figures.</p>
<p>This is why I have chosen to name this essay after the art historical symposium occurring this year in Amsterdam. The historian must decide what should be remembered, and so codified, and what should be sent into the oblivion of the forgotten. Historical novelists are trying to recover from oblivion gleanings from the past which historians have determined to be irrelevant to an understanding of it, but as these essentials have long since dissipated through the course of the forgetfulness of time, novelists are forced to rely on techniques of the fictional imagination to bring the lost past back to life. The change of attitude toward history by many contemporary historians may be feeding into this preponderance of historical readings. In a recent issue of <span class="journaltitle">Lingua Franca</span> Daniel Samuels notes the “elevation of stories, historical and personal, over the often-grim elucidation of facts” in professional historical narration (36).</p>
<p>I am going to make a gross generalization here about the distinction between much historical fiction written by women and much of it which is written by men (I am thinking here, especially, of novels such as Don DeLillo’s <span class="booktitle">Libra</span> and Norman Mailer’s recent contributions about the CIA, the Kennedy assassination, and the life of Picasso), and that is that male historical novelists tend to be more literal in their approach to history than female ones. Mailer and DeLillo embellish historical facts in order to speculate on the reasons behind particular events; they remain rooted in and tied to real events. Female novelists, such as those who I will be discussing in most detail here - Ducornet, Winterson, and Daitch - focus on the subordinate and powerless position of women in the past and draw in aspects of history which have been hitherto denied - the emotional, the illogical, the feelings behind the events rather than the events themselves. These women also often deviate from a mere recording of events to the extent that they use the supernatural as an avenue of escape from the repressions of the culture which history describes.</p>
<p>The reconfiguration of history is, then, the central focus of Ducornet’s novel, as well as of Winterson’s <span class="booktitle">The Passion</span>, and Daitch’s <span class="booktitle">L.C.</span> Ducornet’s historical touchstone is Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) while Winterson’s is Napoleon Bonaparte, and Daitch’s is Eugene Delacroix. These historical figures resurface repeatedly in each novel, and while they occasionally come into direct contact with the novels’ characters, they remain for the most part in the background. Dodgson, Napoleon, and Delacroix are not in these novels to provide biographical or traditional historical interest, but rather to place the novels’ actions in a re-imagined historical context which is in the process of revision. None of these writers is trying to encapsulate the past by writing in the style of the time, either; each is attempting to restore to the present memory those important pieces of the past which, rather than being stored in the public and generic repository of history, have been dissolved into the oblivion of time.</p>
<p>This new approach to history overtly acknowledges and even embraces inaccuracy and beyond it, the supernatural, in order to view less rational aspects of the past as equally important as the ever-present historical descriptions of battles. Winterson’s character Henri, for instance, accounts for the reason that he has been willing to follow Napoleon for so long and through so many hardships by expressing his strong emotions for his leader: “He stretched his hand towards the Channel and made England sound as though she already belonged to us. To each of us. That was his gift. He became the focus of our lives… He made sense out of dullness” (20); and later, “I should admit that I wept when I heard him speak. Even when I hated him, he could still make me cry. And not through fear. He was great. Greatness like his is hard to be sensible about” (30).</p>
<p>Henri does briefly describe Napoleon’s fiascos in Boulogne and his campaign against the Third Coalition, but only to explain how Napoleon’s hold over his men continued through unbelievable hardship: “We fought at Ulm and Austerlitz. Eylau and Friedland. We fought on no rations, our boots fell apart, we slept two or three hours a night and died in thousands every day… We believed him. We always did” (79). Only such an overwhelming love for a leader could have driven these soldiers to tolerate such extremes of adversity. This is the type of emotion that is neglected in traditional history.</p>
<p>Even though Winterson’s character Henri serves in Napoleon’s army for eight years, he provides us with precious little in the way of typical historical detail. Instead, he discusses at great length Napoleon’s passion for chicken, and what it was like to kill the birds for him and to put on his boots in a hurry to serve the Emperor his chicken. Henri describes twice in the novel how the cook keeps the parsley for garnishing the poultry in a dead man’s helmet. These artifacts from the past are important to Henri and establish the importance, therefore, of seemingly irrelevant detail in recreating the past in its entirety: its feel, its textures, its tastes, its smells.</p>
<p>Henri emphasizes, in fact, that he does not care to be an accurate historian, but that he wants to represent emotions. When defending his intention to keep a diary to his fellow soldier, Henri explains, “I don’t care about the facts, Domino, I care about how I feel. How I feel will change, I want to remember that” (29). In contrast to the words of the diary are the words of the historian, words which deflect the true punishment experienced by the participants; as Henri says, “Words like devastation, rape, slaughter, carnage, starvation are lock and key words to keep the pain at bay. Words about war that are easy on the eye” (5). Through the voice of Henri, Winterson wants us to relive the misery of Napoleon’s wars, rather than merely to know about them from the distance of emotionless history.</p>
<p>This diary, as a tool for reconstituting history, contains more than just the minor details of Henri’s life or a standard record of battles. He also writes down what Napoleon says. When Henri is in Napoleon’s presence, everything he says sounds “like a great thought.” But when Henri rereads his diary he “only later realized how bizarre most of [Napoleon’s aphorisms] were” (30). What this indicates is that Henri was a reporter of his time, someone who met Napoleon and listened to him. What it also indicates, however, is that Napoleon sounded wonderful when he was speaking but was not really saying anything of importance. It required personal contact to fall under the spell of his charisma. What is important about this diary, therefore, is that it explains not just what happens in Henri’s life in terms of factual events, but what happens to him and his fellow soldiers in terms of their fervent regard for Napoleon.</p>
<p>Henri admits the power of any historian, fictionally motivated or otherwise, over his subject: “I invented Bonaparte as much as he invented himself” (158). This type of history encourages the interference and incorporation of fiction into a form that had been attempting to be accurate and objective.</p>
<p>Winterson emphasizes the intentionally illogical state of this type of history by repeating four times in the course of the novel, including in its last line, “I’m telling you stories. Trust me.” Though history is a story of the past, it claims not to be fiction. By saying that this narrator is “telling stories,” however, Winterson makes us suspect him or her as a historian, so that even though the “trust me” tries to establish reliability, we are sent into an endless oscillation between faith in and distrust of the narrator. We can no longer merely take what history says as the truth, but must treat it as if it is our own memory and sift through its convolutions for traces of the real past, and we must acknowledge the relativity of that past. Daitch reinforces this mistrust of history, of the eyewitness, of the diary, by having Lucienne Crozier say in <span class="booktitle">L.C.</span>, “Collective memory is an unstable element, and to rely on it is to rely on something whose longevity is questionable. I could be accused of writing fiction. It will be said she wrote what she claimed was true but the history books fail to provide corroboration” (138). Also, the apparent inaccuracy of the translation of Crozier’s diary sets up mistrust for anything that she writes, for any events that she recounts.</p>
<p>Ducornet uses a surprisingly similar interweaving of history in <span class="booktitle">The Jade Cabinet</span>, but she embellishes it with a lot of attention to the function of the memory in recreating the past. Like Proust, who thinks that it is possible to recapture the past through the actions of the memory, to re-member the past, Ducornet believes that, indeed, the memory can reconstitute the past. She begins the novel with a quotation from James Beattie (<span class="booktitle">Elements of Moral Science</span>, 1790) which indicates the tangibility of the past which memory produces: “Memory presents us with thoughts of what is past accompanied with a persuasion that they were once real” (9).</p>
<p>Ducornet emphasizes this reliance on and belief in the reconstructive powers of the memory by giving her narrator the name Memory. Memory is a Proustian figure: much of her remembrance is based on the sensual. She remembers her father’s study through its smell of “keeping medium” (formaldehyde); she remembers times with Charles Dodgson through the smell of his photography chemical, collodion; and she remembers the evil Radulph Tubbs through the aroma of his favorite Stilton cheese.</p>
<p>Memory’s memory also provides details of private lives which typical historical accounts do not indicate, even those relying on first-hand accounts. Memory mentions the existence of chamber pots three times and finally stops her narration to explain why she keeps talking about them: “The pot was there (a bold-faced reminder of mortality) and my readers sophisticated enough, I should hope, to have accepted their and mine own corporeality” (78). The implication here goes beyond the mere recognition of the Victorian treatment of excretion by acknowledging the human body, a body which is finally as ephemeral in nature as is the memory itself.</p>
<p>Ducornet presents memory as inconsistent. Memory describes the action of the memory by saying, “There are those who say that the memory is like a collector’s cabinet where souvenirs are tucked away as moths or tiny shells intact. But I think not. As I write this it occurs to me that for each performance of the mind our souvenirs reconstruct themselves. The memory is like an act of magic” (15). The memory, then, is not a repository of fixed images, impressions, events, from the individual’s past. Instead, each time we reach into our memories for an item out of our pasts, we need to recreate it, causing it to change according to the shifting context of the present. To emphasize this, Memory later refers to the artifacts of the memory as a “cabinet of chameleons,” as a series of “chimera,” items which transmute each time we have recourse to them (92).</p>
<p>The primary historical touchstone in this novel is Charles Dodgson, the author of <span class="booktitle">Alice in Wonderland</span>. Dodgson spends a great deal of time with the Sphery girls, Memory and Etheria. He takes them to country fairs; he photographs them nude and in costumes; he goes boating with them on the Cherwal river. Memory asserts her jealousy of Alice Liddell for becoming the star of Dodgson’s book. And it was Radulph Tubbs, Memory’s brother-in-law and later husband, who finally made public Dodgson’s habit of spending so much time with naked little girls. Dodgson’s name, like Napoleon’s in <span class="booktitle">The Passion</span>, surfaces frequently in this novel, serving to unify the novel, but also to reiterate the relationship between history and memory. Each historical figure interacts directly with the novels’ characters, but never actually enters or impinges upon the narration - they are outside characters.</p>
<p>The focus in these novels on the role of memory in historical recapitulation causes each of these authors to use first-person spokesmen, narrators who compose their own diaries or use those of others in order to compile their histories. This creates a more personal feel in these histories than that of traditional history, which uses a detached third person observer, yet it also develops the impression that this type of history is too emotionally invested to be trustworthy. Memory says late in the novel, “My special intention is to tell things as they were, as best I can. And yet, and I admit it freely, hindrances abound. There is so much I do not know or do not recall and so must imagine” (125). These novelists are trying to establish, however, the validity of this elusive quality of the memory, that its very intangibility and emotiveness are essential to true historical accounts.</p>
<p>The plot of these novels is more or less tangential, as well, to represent the erratic operation of the memory, but also perhaps to indicate that we are as little able to “predict” the past as the future. While Winterson’s novel remains consistently focused on the two main characters, Henri and Villanelle, however, and Daitch’s is primarily the diary of Lucienne Crozier, Ducornet’s novel not only strays from its primary figures of Etheria and Memory, but follows Etheria’s abusive and unimaginative husband Radulph Tubbs to Egypt and finally focuses on Tubbs’s lover, the Hungerkunstler, and on his architect, Prosper Baconfield. In doing so, Ducornet effectively denudes the memory of its reconstitutive capabilities. We receive scarcely a flicker of an impression of Memory herself, and in order to attain her freedom Etheria has to lose her corporeality, and so must disappear literally into thin air. The only escape from the subordinate role of wife appears to be through magic and the supernatural. Perhaps what this troubling loss of the main characters indicates is our own loss, since Proust, of faith in the act of historical reconstruction through the repository of the memory, yet we feel compelled to continue to try to do so.</p>
<p>We are left with the body of Tubbs which does begin to shrink towards the end of the novel when he develops an obsession for Dodgson and stalks him, but yet, because Tubbs becomes central to the novel, we lose sight of the ostensibly primary figures of the Sphery sisters. Memory admits that “nowhere is the inherent contradiction of corporeality more evident than during the act of remembering” (126), but the novel’s increasing attention to those who are supposed to be peripheral distorts the revision of history and takes it back to its corrupted roots, the traditional history based on the actions of males. This does not mean that postpostmodern historical fiction must always redress the failure of history to account for women, but by dissolving the women and turning the story away from them, Ducornet dismisses their power.</p>
<p>In some respects, for this very reason, Susan Daitch’s novel <span class="booktitle">L.C.</span> provides the fewest solutions of these three examples to the 19th century subordination of women. Also set in France, but in the mid-century, this novel presents the “diary” of Lucienne Crozier, a woman who married wealth for the financial well-being of her family. Daitch never stops reminding us of the sorry position of the 19th century bourgeois woman. “Marriages were often arranged by families for economic reasons,” she says. “Women were considered part of their husbands’ accumulated property” (3). “The family needs money, they send you to Paris to marry into a rich family,” Lucienne Crozier writes in her diary (13). “Bourgeois women don’t work and…their slot in society is a position of determined parroting” (105), and “Without the right to vote, own property or be educated, wives, mothers, mistresses, daughters play the role of sweeps to history, as much a part of an anonymous support system to men of the left as to men of the right” (150).</p>
<p>While Winterson’s Villanelle has complete autonomy - working in a casino as either a man or a woman (or sometimes, apparently, as both), or escaping from her oppressive roles as wife or prostitute, or raising her and Henri’s child while maintaining her social status as a respectable widow - and Etheria at least flees the fleshly entrapment of her abusive husband, Lucienne Crozier only transgresses her stifling marriage by having affairs with other equally dominant men. Not only that, but these men are famous figures of history - Eugene Delacroix and Jean de la Tour.</p>
<p>In Daitch’s novel, then, there is no escape for women from patriarchal restriction. Things become, in fact, increasingly repressive for Lucienne - from the suppression of the Paris uprising of 1848, to her exile in the Muslim country of Algeria (as de la Tour’s mistress). Periodically, she and her best friend in Paris, Fabienne, dress as men so that they can go out in public with comparative ease, but it is never with the ease of Winterson’s Villanelle, who uses cross-dressing as a sexual device rather than as an entré to social freedom.</p>
<p>What perhaps imbues the Winterson and Ducornet novels with more respite from the inadequacy of the social roles of women is the ease with which they integrate the supernatural into their novels. By making the magical real (à la magical realism) these novelists make the possibility real for women to attain fulfillment on a social level. While I have expressed here my quibbles with Etheria’s escape from the body, she at least does so, through her devotion to the skills of the magician. Winterson’s Villanelle, too, consistently maintains autonomy through her manipulation of gender, whether through mere costume change or real transformation. The other supernatural instances in <span class="booktitle">The Passion</span> - the theft of Villanelle’s heart by her lover, Patrick’s ability to see details in the extremely far distance - serve to reinforce the freedom of magic.</p>
<p>Even so, these efforts to recuperate what has been lost in the oblivion of the unrecorded past are essential to a redefinition of history. While these novels recover details of the past which traditional history would obviate, they also reveal the decadence of late twentieth-century fiction in their very adherence to that history, for their use of history is a form of appropriation. Appropriation has its merits in its humor, although none of these novels contains much of that, but it is also important in its ability to take on something from the past and reshape it. However, appropriation is also a dangerous symptom of decay, for it recalls Walter Benjamin’s theory of allegory; these historical novels use history to represent the present in a way that legitimizes the oppressive aspects of contemporary culture.</p>
<p>It is no surprise that Benjamin turned his attention to the decadence of German drama, as his treatment of it in essence explained the decadence of his own time and place. Benjamin saw death and decay in allegory’s treatment of history. “Everything about history,” he wrote in <span class="booktitle">The Origin of German Tragic Drama</span>, “which from the very beginning, has been untimely, sorrowful, unsuccessful expresses itself in a…death’s head… This is the core of the allegorical way of seeing, of the baroque, secular account of history as the Passion of the world, a world that is meaningful only in the stations of its decay” (343). Briefly, while Benjamin found the allegory of the baroque to be a more realistic view of history than the idealistic symbolic system of classicism, he yet found it to be melancholic and depressed. The recent upsurge of critical interest in Benjamin’s work reinforces the sense that contemporary fiction is once again allegorical in its return to history, and that we, too, are experiencing a decay like that of the German baroque period and postwar Germany with their accompanying depression (note the current extensive use of Prozac).</p>
<p>Even though historical novelists are trying to revise history, to bring it into accordance with the full experience of previous lives, they keep falling into the trap of what the art historian Benjamin Buchloh refers to as “historical secondariness” (60). The act of appropriation makes the historical experience less fresh, less direct a response to the past. This “specter of derivativeness,” as Buchloh calls it, taints the novelists’ efforts to recover history because by addressing history so closely, they uncritically accept their own culture and how history has brought it to this state. Daitch, for instance, essentially reinforces an acceptance of the subordinate position of women by tying women’s historical roles to their relationships to famous men. Appropriation tends to venerate the past rather than to criticize the present institutions of repression.</p>
<p>This emphasis on depression and lack of resistance is apparent in these novels through the fates of the central characters. Henri loses his mind because Villanelle cannot or will not reciprocate his passion for her; Villanelle becomes a wealthy woman who leads a relatively (for her) conventional and not introspective life; Etheria loses her body into the vapours of magic in order to escape the physical and emotional abuses of her husband; Memory never really exists physically or emotionally at all, a virgin until Etheria’s husband takes her on late in life as his second wife; and Lucienne dies (possibly) in Algeria of consumption. These characters are, then, either crushed by the status quo or conform to repressive convention.</p>
<p>Winterson’s and Ducornet’s fiction reflect this acquiescence, for while they enlarge the definition of history to include more than mere dates and events, they perceive history as codified and therefore appropriate in the confirmation of the current power structure. Winterson reinforces this when she has Villanelle describe the present in terms of the past: “The future is foretold from the past and the future is only possible because of the past. Without past and future, the present is partial. All time is eternally present and so all time is ours. There is no sense in forgetting and every sense in dreaming. Thus the present is made rich. Thus the present is made whole” (62). It is, of course, essential to remember the past and to see how it has shaped the present, but the idea that the present can be made whole through the memory represents a too ready acceptance of the imperfections in what the present continues to hold for us. Don’t forget: in re-membering the past, we are also re-membering our present and our future. “I’m telling you stories. Trust me.”</p>
<p>&gt;&gt;–&gt; <span class="lightEmphasis">Joyce writes the <a href="/writingpostfeminism/postfeminism" class="internal">prologue</a> to the (Post)Feminism thread.</span></p>
<h2>Works Cited</h2>
<p>Benjamin, Walter. <span class="booktitle">The Origin of German Tragic Drama</span>. Intro. George Steiner. Trans. John Osborne. London: Verso, 1977.</p>
<p>Buchloh, Benjamin. “From Detail to Fragment: Décollage Affichiste.” <span class="booktitle">October 56</span> (Spring 1991): 98-110.</p>
<p>Daitch, Susan. <span class="booktitle">L.C.</span> New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1987.</p>
<p>Ducornet, Rikki. <span class="booktitle">The Jade Cabinet</span>. Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 1993.</p>
<p>Proust, Marcel. <span class="booktitle">Remembrance of Things Past</span>. 2 vols. Trans. C.K. Scott Moncrieff. New York: Random House, 1934.</p>
<p>Samuels, David. “The Call of Stories.” <span class="journaltitle">Lingua Franca</span> 5.4 (May/June 1995): 35-43.</p>
<p>Winterson, Jeanette. <span class="booktitle">The Passion</span>. New York: The Atlantic Monthly Press, 1987.</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/proust">proust</a>, <a href="/tags/lisa-joyce">lisa joyce</a>, <a href="/tags/elisabeth-joyce">elisabeth joyce</a>, <a href="/tags/madison-smartt-bell">madison smartt bell</a>, <a href="/tags/julia-blackburn">julia blackburn</a>, <a href="/tags/napoleon">napoleon</a>, <a href="/tags/pat-barker">pat barker</a>, <a href="/tags/james-beattie">james beattie</a>, <a href="/tags/elizabeth-arthur">elizabeth arthur</a>, <a href="/tags/peter-carrey">peter carrey</a>, <a href="/tags/historicism">historicism</a>, <a href="/tags/historical-fiction">historical fiction</a>, <a href="/tags/feminsism">feminsism</a>, <a href="/tags/postfeminism">postfeminism</a>, <a href="/tags/rikki-ducornet">Rikki Ducornet</a>, <a href="/tags/jeanette-winterson">jeanette winterson</a>, <a href="/tags/and-susan-daitch">and Susan Daitch</a></div></div></div>Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:25:05 +0000EBR Administrator929 at http://www.electronicbookreview.comhttp://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/writingpostfeminism/historically#commentsWriting as a Woman: Annie Abrahams' e-writinghttp://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/writingpostfeminism/womblike
<div class="field field-name-field-author field-type-node-reference field-label-hidden clearfix">
<div class="markup">by</div>
<div class="field-items">
<div class="field-item even">Lisa Joyce</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="field field-name-field-publication-date field-type-datetime field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single">2005-01-26</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>At this year’s Women’s History Month celebration on my university campus I participated on a panel on Women’s (Art)Work. The panel was composed of several female artists and myself. Each of them sees art as fundamentally shaped by the artist’s gender. They would say with a surprising, to me anyway, degree of acceptance (they have really bought into this idea!) that women’s art is domestic, that women make art about the body, that women use different materials than men do. One of the women on the panel is a young sculptor, quite talented and devoted to her work. It did not appear to trouble her at all that her work - dark, enclosed spaces of different types - is always described as womblike. I kept asking her and the others on the panel if her gender isn’t shaping the viewer’s response to her work. What I would take as compelling images of claustrophobia and compulsory containment, they are taking as warm and inviting and safe.</p>
<p>I kept thinking about male artists who make the same kind of work. Do people EVER see <a href="http://www.postmedia.net/01/schneider.htm" class="outbound">Gregor Schneider</a> ‘s work as womb-like? Do they even perceive it as related to the body, as some kind of warped colon, a “dirty” trail of winding odd confining passages, for instance? The criticism that I can find on his work talks about the disorientation that he creates in the space of his parent’s house, but it never relates his work to how it might recreate the human body. And yet, his work, while cruddier (in the sense of dirt, not judgment!) than my colleague’s, is not that dissimilar from hers. People never see <a href="http://www.fabricworkshopandmuseum.org/exhibitions/neto.php" class="outbound">Ernesto Neto</a> ‘s sculpture as womblike, either. But he always uses fabrics (a woman’s medium!) that stretch and contain, and that are permeable, just like the membranes of a womb. Instead, when critics discuss his work, it is in terms of the senses, of tactility and space, but not in terms of wombs, of that feeling of warmth and comfort and waiting, that nurturance that a woman’s work provides. His work seems much more womblike to me, though, than my colleague’s does.</p>
<p>The problem exists, I believe, in this assumption that women’s work is domestic and private, and men’s work is public and theoretical. I keep thinking of my husband’s work: his latest series of sculptures is entirely domestic and quiet, all about our family and friends, nothing about the world out there. I’m wondering if his work would have been possible without gender politics in art. It strikes me that focus on gender issues in the arts has permitted sculpture especially to embrace a wider range of media and content than had been available to it. In the 1960s artists could weld, carve or cast, like Lee Bontecou did (an example of a female artist making art “like a man”) or they could step outside the mainstream, like Eva Hesse, and use fabrics and “female” methods of construction and installation. It was this continued effort over the past 40 years to open art to more typically “female” materials and images that permitted these materials to gain acceptance. Now, Ernesto Neto can use fabrics, installation artists can use just about anything, and this openness is due to “women’s” art not merely entering the art world, but permeating it.</p>
<p>I have always been especially interested in this question of gender and art when it concerns writing on the Web. We have heard for years about writing on the body and <span class="lightEmphasis">l’écriture feminine</span>, about how the way a woman writes is different than the way a man writes. I have never understood how to take this. Is there a quantifiable difference between men’s and women’s writing? Something about the number of adjectives? The sentence structure? (my son says that it has something to do with lots and lots of capital letters and exclamation points). I hesitate to make this kind of judgment, that without the presence of the writing body, the writing itself could be different according to the writing body’s gender, but I have always wondered if my reluctance to do this isn’t driven by my fear that women’s writing or anything female isn’t perceived as lesser than men’s. The moment that a work of art of any kind in any medium is related to the gender of the artist that produced it, it is vulnerable to the discrimination that a woman’s work must face.</p>
<p>Having said all of this, and having expressed my irritation that women themselves identify their work as gender-driven, I find that I need to make the same commitment in this essay because Annie Abrahams’ writing is clearly female writing. While her colleagues are composing abstractions about poetry, she is writing about relationships and communication and touching or not touching. Julien D’Abrigeon, for instance, plays with homonyms in “horde d’ordre &amp;amp; d’horreur: or, hors (de); ordre, odeur; nom, nomme, mon, mène, mêle. In “Proposition de voyage temporel dans l’infinité d’un instant 2.0” he repeats the day’s date, streaming up the page in multiple colors and styles. In “balanc&amp;amp;parpill&amp;amp;” the word “balancé” appears in the center of the screen while “ça&amp;amp;” in multiples streams by. Clicking on “balancé” changes the central word to “éparillé” and the streaming letters to “la&amp;amp;.” A poem by Dumolin and D’Abrigeon called “l’hommage de <span class="lightEmphasis">BMPT</span> ” involves the word “Poesie,” distorted into Optical Illusion (see all of these pieces at <a href="http://tapin.free.fr/cinetiq.htm" class="outbound">http://tapin.free.fr/cinetiq.htm</a>). While I admit that I focus here on one poet in particular, few of the epoems by Abrahams’ colleagues “talk” about anything other than the act of writing, of writing electronically, of manipulating the text visually as well as semantically.</p>
<p>Annie Abrahams composes pieces that focus women’s issues or stereotypical female characteristics: nurturance, relationships, peace, communication, pain. I would like to suggest that we need to look at these women’s issues from multiple perspectives, and that doing so, will actually let gender politics create an art experience that is richer than it might have been without feminism. Nurturance from the typical female aspect is kind and caring; a nurturing person wants to make everything better, to make those around her feel better. But isn’t a nurturing person also a controlling person? Someone who feels superior to those being nurtured as in “I’m the adult here and you are the child;” “I’m the nurse who is in charge and you are the passive patient”? Someone who is telling everyone around her what to do and how to feel? The same approach holds true for my earlier example about my colleague’s wombs. A womb is warm and safe and provides comfort on one level; on another it is dark and confining and entrapping. A womb is ultimately a claustrophobic container that provokes nightmarish fears. When I talk about Abrahams’ work below, therefore, I will not use scare quotes to indicate stereotypes that require questioning; instead, the underside of these stereotypes needs examination to flesh out, as it were, the fuller approach to women’s art.</p>
<p>“Co(mn)fort, “Painsong” and “touch(er)” are especially female in their approach. In one section “Co(mn)fort” contains a long list of compliments that express reassurance ( <a href="http://www.bram.org/confort/index.html" class="outbound">http://www.bram.org/confort/index.html</a>). In another section Abrahams filmed a dozen or so people saying in different languages words of comfort to an imaginary person. What, in 30 - 60 seconds, can one person think of to say to someone who is feeling absolutely devoid of hope? Her subjects took their assignments quite seriously, which is another great moment in her work. How do we find a way to talk in public about the warm and fuzzy without feeling or looking stupid? It isn’t cool to be nice, but Abrahams pulls it off. However, as I just said, what business do these people have telling us to feel better? It presumes that we don’t feel well. It presumes that our pain is something to get rid of and that they will prescribe ways to do that.</p>
<p>“Painsong” is a collection of statements about pain in French, Dutch, and English ( <a href="http://www.bram.org/pain/index2.htm" class="outbound">http://www.bram.org/pain/index2.htm</a>). It is fairly weak from usability and aesthetic standpoints. It consists of a white background with red spots of varying sizes. In the center of the screen is a series of green-colored sound bars, with control icons that are so minute that they are useless. Even with DSL, this site takes an eternity to load. Many of the statements reiterate Abrahams’ issues in other sites: “Don’t touch me” and “I want to be alone.” Two of the statements talk to “Papa” and accuse him of being responsible for her pain. Push everyone away. Pay attention to me. Daddy is at fault (I’m just a little girl and not in charge of my own destiny). “Painsong” demonstrates fewer of the stereotypically positive features of femininity and more of the negative ones. This is an immature and irritable woman who cannot take hold of her life and must blame others for her misery. The song is less about pain and the sadness about it - perhaps what I was expecting was fortitude in the face of it - than about the pain of life and the tension between the desire for solitude, away from those who cause pain, and the overwhelming plea for Daddy’s attention, to be with him and NOT alone. In my obtuse reading, I see the female figure here as out of T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land”: “My nerves are bad to-night.”</p>
<p>In a personal exchange with Abrahams, she says, however, that this piece centers on whether or not it is possible to sing pain, but that it also puts the visitor in the position of inflicting pain, since activating the site produces the sound, “ai!,” “as if someone were hurt.” The focus of the work then becomes whether or not the person causing the pain (the viewer) becomes a participant in it and what that person gets out of this interaction: sadistic pleasure? Personal pain? Consolation? Sadness at the pain of another?</p>
<p>“Confrontation” is the work that appeals to me most, though I rather wish that I were not confronted with the URL of the upcoming images or the countdown of their loading sizes ( <a href="http://www.bram.org/confront/indexcon.htm" class="outbound">http://www.bram.org/confront/indexcon.htm</a>). I also wish that the entire piece were not crammed into the upper left of the screen. Having said that, I find that what the piece says about communication is quite compelling. Single images related to war drawn from the Internet appear in the upper left every minute or so. Adjacent to them and overlapping them is a series of text lines mostly in English and French, sometimes both at once, and sometimes in other languages in black and red. Sometimes it isn’t possible to read these words when their colors match those of the underlying image. These are, as Abrahams calls them, “words of hope” that visitors to the webpage have left to “confront the images.” Some of these statements are typical: “I hope for peace”; “I hope faith [sic].” However, the more hope lines that appear, the more that it becomes clear that the hope is hopeless, that there is nothing that we can do to confront war: “I hope fuck you [sic],” “I hope I do not wet my pants,” “I hope your uniform is a little too small for you,” “I hope you forget my name,” “I hope you leave me.” We are set up by the preliminary words - I hope - to believe that what follows will be positive. When it isn’t, we are crushed, repeatedly, that much more. The statements purport to be about hope for peace on earth and the accompanying comfort of warmth and cosiness, but the hope is odd, depressed, and negative.</p>
<p>While the images and text lines are cycling through, a man and a woman converse. At first I thought that they were speaking in Chinese, but then I read that Abrahams says that they are speaking in their own invented languages, so that they talk without understanding each other and so that we cannot understand them, either. The sound of these people talking interferes with the text. Between the sound and the images, it is nearly impossible to read, even though the sound is unintelligible. It’s as if the audible speaking is blocking the reading part of the brain, as if the part of the brain that understands spoken language is stronger than the one that comprehends writing, so that the unrecognizability of the spoken “words” blocks the recognizable written ones.</p>
<p>Abrahams says that “confrontation leads to an incapacity to define war and hope as opponents, but lets them seem more as striving forces that appear on every level of our lives” ( <a href="http://www.turbulence.org/spotlight/abrahams/index.htm" class="outbound">http://www.turbulence.org/spotlight/abrahams/index.htm</a>). This explains why the hope statements do not directly address the war images and why, in fact, the hope statements undermine themselves. If these “forces” of war and hope are oppositional but never resolvable, it makes sense to place them side by side, and even allow them to share space, but to have them never quite recognize each other.</p>
<p>What makes “Confrontation” female? Perhaps it’s the warm and fuzzy hope feelings; perhaps it’s the criticism of war. In Abrahams’ interview by Pavu, she says that “Confrontation” shows “Service-to-others and Service-to-self interacting and sometimes intertwining up to a point they don’t know to what party they belong anymore” ( <a href="http://www.postartum.org/p2p/anniea-p2p-interview.html" class="outbound">http://www.postartum.org/p2p/anniea-p2p-interview.html</a>). It isn’t as if men don’t think about service to others, but the stereotype of women (and isn’t that what we are talking about here?) is a focus on the needs of the other. Once those two impulses are scrambled, the woman no longer knows how to direct her focus. The work is situated around a typically female issue and undermines it in order to call attention to what happens when it is disrupted.</p>
<p>“Understanding,” linked directly from “Confrontation,” is one of Abrahams’ more complicated pieces in terms of design and interaction, but it is full of commands - “Stop, don’t touch/ my borders, tell me how to avoid you/ go go go go go…home,” “Stay, don’t leave/ I need you to/ make my frontiers weaker” - and many critical remarks to us (the “you” on the page) - “You will never be me” and “You will never be able to understand me.” One of the commands says to go away; the other says to stay. One is asking, demanding even, that the viewer keep physical distance from her. The other is saying in a needy kind of a way that the viewer must stay close by. These commands nag at us. The first one says that being me is better than being you; the second one says that you are incapable of understanding in general, much less of understanding one individual (me). Negative stereotypes of women that this website promulgates are perhaps diffused by the anxiety that permeates it: “Always/ Changing/ Never the/ Same” and “floating/ loosing [sic]/ control.” “Why not?” asks the page.</p>
<p>Even Abrahams’ little dialogue box that pops up periodically is female in nature, if to be cheerful is “female”: “Smile on your friend in the morning,” it says. The button to make the box disappear says, “o.k.” Isn’t this box an order? Don’t we hate people who are cheerful first thing in the morning? Don’t we perceive this cheerfulness as an active state of aggression (o.k., perhaps I’m giving something personal away here, but I’m sure that you will agree with me)?</p>
<p>Ultimately, as Abrahams’ “Being Human” says, “where*?FUTUREoù?*,” where are we? “Everywhere/ Nowhere/ I don’t know/ You do know.” The answers are in paired oppositions, but perhaps gender politics have permitted us to co-opt the binary oppositions vilified by feminists (and rightly so) so that art has greater depth to offer. It isn’t a bad thing to see the underside of the beast of femininity, and perhaps it is a sign that it’s finally o.k. to be female, that women no longer have to make art like men, that making female-focused art no longer entails discrimination, and that in fact, it opens art to multiple perspectives, enhancing the available range of readings. “I don’t know/ You DO know.”</p>
<p style="text-align: center;">________________</p>
<p>&gt;&gt;–&gt;Lisa Joyce writes the <a href="/writingpostfeminism/postfeminism" class="internal">Introduction</a> to the original Writing (Post)feminism thread in <span class="journaltitle">ebr</span>. She also reviews the work of Susan Howe in <a href="/writingpostfeminism/origins" class="internal">‘Thorowly’ American</a>, and the historical fiction of Rikki Ducornet, Jeanette Winterson, and Susan Daitch in <a href="/writingpostfeminism/historically" class="internal">Memory and Oblivion</a>.</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/elisabeth-joyce">elisabeth joyce</a>, <a href="/tags/lisa-joyce">lisa joyce</a>, <a href="/tags/annie-abrahams">annie abrahams</a>, <a href="/tags/ernesto-neto">Ernesto Neto</a>, <a href="/tags/lee-bontecou">Lee Bontecou</a>, <a href="/tags/eva-hesse">eva hesse</a>, <a href="/tags/julien-d%E2%80%99abrigeon">Julien D&amp;#8217;Abrigeon</a>, <a href="/tags/webarts">webarts</a>, <a href="/tags/e-writing">e-writing</a>, <a href="/tags/femin">femin</a>, <a href="/tags/internet">internet</a>, <a href="/tags/embodi">embodi</a>, <a href="/tags/womb">womb</a>, <a href="/tags/gender">gender</a></div></div></div>Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:25:05 +0000EBR Administrator1075 at http://www.electronicbookreview.comhttp://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/writingpostfeminism/womblike#comments